EA South Africa cancels local Titanfall release

07 March 2014

By Miklós Szecsei

News has hit that the local release of Titanfall has been cancelled. Electronic Arts South Africa has released a brief statement via Facebook saying that after consideration, and due to the lack of Microsoft Azure servers (which host Titanfall in other territories), they’ve taken the decision not to release Titanfall locally.

“After conducting recent online tests for Titanfall, we found that the performance rates in South Africa were not as high as we need to guarantee a great experience, so we have decided not to release Titanfall in South Africa at this time.

We understand this is a disappointment for local fans and will keep fans posted on any future plans regarding the release of Titanfall in South Africa.”

Considering many local gamers participated in the game’s beta and came out saying that despite high pings the game was still entirely playable, this decision is shocking. The game has since been removed from the South African EA Origin shop, and it’s likely online retailers will soon be contacting those who pre-ordered already.

Pretty stupid reaction coming from EA, really. SA players have had to make do with lag and higher pings for multiplayer shooters for years, one game won’t change things. I can see more people boycotting them because EA SA has now thrown their toys out the cot.

FanieNel

I know of a perfect place where they can shove the game and their heads in.
This is a really stupid move from them. Many people placed pre-orders, many people played on the beta, many people enjoyed it, and now they cancel it. EA is destroying everyone’s last bit of respect for them. They tend to bring out broken games, and now they won’t even be bringing out the game.

EA can go [censored] themselves.

Nic Simmonds

I think EA should get some credit for cancelling a game on the basis that they are not comfortable that they can deliver an acceptable level of service.

It’s obviously really disappointing though, but I’d have been pretty annoyed if I’d spent R500 and then had to contend with pings upwards of 250ms.

I suspect consoles players will just import the game, although curious to see whether imported PC version will sync with local Origin accounts?

Thing is, a lot of the issues are also ISP-related. My line on Afrihost gets a sub-200ms ping to EU servers.

Nic Simmonds

That’s interesting. I admittedly have not played anything on an international server since my WoW days, which ended about 5 years ago, and back then I was lucky if I could maintain 350-400ms.

I think a lot of people would argue that a fast paced FPS like Titanfall requires pings around 50ms.

Obviously it’s an unpopular decision, but I’m going to assume that EA/Respawn have made a hardline decision to not release the game in territories where they can’t offer server support in order to protect the end-user experience… at the expense of revenue and profit. In principle, this is not a bad thing.

The thing is, Internet Solutions offered to host Titanfall servers. MS offers their Azure service in SA but readily admits that you’re using UK servers (I got this from the reps at the Microsoft booth at rAge). This decision from EA makes no sense at all.

I maintain that the decision does make sense from a quality of service point of view. Releasing an online game exclusively in territories that have dedicated servers for it seems totally reasonable to me. Imagine the uproar if they released the game here and it was unplayable due to high latency?

Also, consider the negative impact that 20,000 South Africans (for argument’s sake) hoping on European servers would have on the gameplay experience for people in Europe? High ping players are not welcome on FPS servers in general.

My point is that the picture is a lot bigger than the average butt hurt gamer is able to see, and that in principle, what they are doing seems to be in the best interest of the end user, at the expense of their own revenue.

That was four years ago, though, things have changed massively in that time period. We’re still not world-class, but we do well enough to get by.

EA’s reasoning still doesn’t make sense to me. MAG got launched here, that did okay. NFS Rivals got launched here, that did okay. Driveclub and The Crew will launch locally as well and I expect those to run acceptably. My dad plays GTA Online, it runs perfectly. Loads of people play Blacklight, or Warframe, or War Thunder, Hawken, DOTA, LoL, Guild Wars 2, Diablo III and even TF2 on EU servers. I just don’t get why they choose to pick up the most anticipated title of the year and tell us that we can’t have it because pings?

By the time it does get into the retail channels once Microsoft launches Azure servers and the Xbox One here, less gamers will be interested.

Rick de Klerk

While I’m disappointed, I agree with you; it’s commendable that EA is choosing not to release a game they think will have sub-par performance locally. Perhaps it’s in response to the negative feedback on Battlefield 4’s multiplayer — they probably don’t want another PR-disaster on one of their major titles.

It does call into question other upcoming games that have Xbox One cloud-based features which may rely on the Azure servers.

This is stupid. I still play freakin’ COD4 on European servers all the time. We can easily get pings of 190-200, which isn’t perfect but it is perfectly playable.

creven

Thank ea for making the desicion easy. Im going PS4

Miklós Szecsei

This is an interesting response that I’ve seen a lot of over the last 24 hours. So were you holding out on new console hardware to get an Xbox One just for Titanfall?

Pieter

There might be a way to bypass this and still be able to play titanfall after all. Download Cyberghost 5 or any VPN. Now pic your country like UK. Go on origin UK and pre order it through them. Next Friday when the game launch in UK reconnect using cyberghost or any VPN and start downloading the game in your origin. Hopefully this works

Ted

EA Has local Battlefield servers, why not local Titanfall servers?? This is West and Zampela, not EA

Miklós Szecsei

Because Titanfall uses Microsoft’s Azure servers, of which there aren’t any in South Africa. Incidentally, Australia also doesn’t have Azure servers, but they’re still getting Titanfall because they connect via Singapore’s Azure bank. You can blame our Telkom infrastructure, not West and Zampella. They probably has very little to do with the decision.

For all the South Africans who feel hard done by its not only SA its the whole of Africa (Including) as EA seams to think that Africa only consists out of South Africa. Personally I think this is in bad taste of EA waiting for a week before release to cancel.

Manofdoom337

EA has 0fficially made me grow a passion to hate them , first they rush DICE into making a all rounder BUGGY game and then they do this ! eff you EA and ure shiz

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